340 LUTHER BURBANK 



are ultimately acquired that prevent crossbreed- 

 ing from being carried to an extent that would 

 introduce a chaotic element in the scheme of 

 evolution. 



The importance of such a demonstration as 

 this, made for the first time on a really com- 

 prehensive scale in the experiment gardens at 

 Santa Rosa and Sebastopol, soon came to be 

 generally recognized. 



The New Experiments and Mendelism 



Perhaps it may be of interest, in extension of 

 the present theme, briefly to trace the relation 

 of the new experiments to the particular aspect 

 of the theory of heredity that has most actively 

 claimed the attention of the biological world in 

 very recent years. 



We refer, of course, to the doctrine of Men- 

 delism, which was to take the biological world 

 by storm in the first decade of the twentieth 

 century. 



Of course the results of the hybridizing 

 experiments performed in my experimental 

 gardens and recorded in the catalogue of 1893 

 could not be at once interpreted in what are now 

 spoken of as Mendelian terms, because at that 

 time no one knew anything of Mendelism as 

 such. The experiments of Mendel had been 



